“So we hit upon an idea which allowed all of us to display our gallantry. Colt rendered up his identification papers, Collins photographed Eleanora, and I used my small talents to doctor Colt’s passport to look like hers.”
“Which meant,” I said slowly, “that Colt couldn’t travel with you. That only you and Collins could escort her to Jacobo.”
Paul laughed without much pleasure. “Collins was not interested in the enterprise. He had asked Eleanora—as payment for his help in rescuing the children—to allow him to use her radio to send out his dispatches on the fall of the capital. It was a stupid thing to do. A shell hit the house not long after we left, I’m told, and Collins was killed. None of his dispatches reached the public.”
The air from the open window chilled the back of my neck. It dried the sweat that had been running down my back, dampening my shirt. There was a chill inside me, too. My left hand clenched and unclenched. My right hand raised my cigarette to my lips again and again. The end of the story was near. I didn’t want to hear it.
I didn’t want her to die.
I stood up. Paul’s voice ceased for a moment at the scraping of my chair. Chandler looked up at me, surprised. I felt embarrassed in front of her.
I turned my back on both of them. I stood at the window. I peered out on the bright lights of the movie theater below. I smoked. Paul went on. His voice had taken on a slightly mocking tone. He seemed to enjoy what I was feeling. Misery loves company.
“I don’t have to explain to you,” he said, “how I felt as I watched Colt kiss her good-bye. As I watched her lay her head against his chest, whisper plans for their reunion. As I say, perhaps she had only been using him for the good he could do her network….”
“You know damn well she wouldn’t have done that,” I said, without turning around.
“Perhaps,” was all Paul said in answer. “At any rate, we helped Eleanora destroy her papers, uproot her communication lines, give warnings to contacts, and so on. Then Colt went back to the heart of the city to join the airlift, Collins stayed behind, and Eleanora and I set off for Jacobo.”
He paused. I watched my reflection on the windowpane. I imagined her form floating in the night beyond it. I imagined her looking in on me as I looked out at her. Have pity, Eleanora, I thought, on those of us still stuck in the world.
“Travel is part of a trader’s business,” Paul said. “I knew the ropes, as they say. Even under the circumstances, the trip to Jacobo was not eventful. We were stopped on the road no more than four times. Each time, my name—and, of course, my money—saw us through. However, the going was circuitous and slow. It took us three days to reach Jacobo. By the time we had, the capital had gone under. The nation belonged to the rebels. In Jacobo, rebels and rebel sympathizers had risen up and set the city on fire. We managed to reach Eleanora’s safe house but found there a scene depressingly similar to the one we’d just finished with. Here, again, were the refugees, children and adults—about twenty of them—who’d made their way here in hopes of finding one last chance of escape. When they saw Eleanora, they were overjoyed. And the great woman set about the effort of getting them out of the country in small groups of two or three. One of the journalists you mentioned in your article—Donald Wexler—he helped with that.”
I turned sharply from the window. “He was there?”
“Yes.”
“He met Eleanora?”
“Why, yes. They spoke together for some time, in fact.”
“He never told me that,” I murmured.
“Ah, well, my friend,” said Paul in that mocking tone again, “she was not an easy woman to share.”
I nodded. “Go on,” I said. I watched him now through the smoke.
“Then again,” said Paul, “perhaps he was just too modest to tell you of his heroic exploits. As I recall, he had a jeep which he used to drive some of the refugees through enemy lines to safety. That was the last I saw of him. Soon after that, anyway, the end came….”
This time, when he paused, he stared sadly at his black cigarette case. Mournfully, he lifted a new butt to his lips.
I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Why don’t you tell it?” I said sharply. “Why don’t you quit stalling, and tell the end?”
“John.” It was Chandler. She spoke quietly from her chair. I could hear the surprise and agitation in her voice. I didn’t look at her.
Paul made a small bow her way. “No, no,” he said. “Your friend is quite right. I am too much enamored of melodrama. A lifelong weakness.”
“Just tell the story, Paul,” I said.
The smuggler pinned me with his sunken eyes. “They raided the house,” he said without expression. “Rebel soldiers. They descended on us out of nowhere one night, circled the place, calling her name, calling for Eleanora. I was in a bedroom upstairs at the time. She was in the room beside me. I could have gone to her, I could have tried to save her. I could have died defending her.” He gestured with his cigarette again. Now there was too much smoke everywhere to follow a single trail. “I made one of my … famous escapes,” Paul said. “Onto the roof, down a drainpipe … into the night. I turned back and saw the soldiers close in on the house. I heard the sound of splintering wood. I heard Eleanora call for me.”
“All right,” I said.
“And then I heard her scream.”
“Knock it off.”
“I heard her scream again and then again.”
Without thinking, I went at him. Hurling my cigarette to one side, I reached down and grabbed him by his jacket lapels.
Chandler leapt up. “John!” she cried.
I dragged the bastard to his feet. I pulled him up to me until we were nose to nose.
“What did you do?” I screamed into his face. “You son of a bitch, what the fuck did you do?”
Paul smiled sadly. Mockingly. “I left her there,” he said. “I left her there.”
For another moment, I held him. I peered in rage into that scarred, miserable face. I wanted to smash him. I wanted to knock him to the floor and beat him till he said it wasn’t true. Till he admitted he’d gone back for her, saved her….
“I ran for my life,” he said, “and left her there to die.”
My clenched hands opened. Paul dropped back into his chair. His head sunk on his breast. I turned away. I wandered toward my desk. As I went, I came across the cigarette I had tossed away. It lay on the brown wood of the floor. The smoke drifted up from it in a thin stream. Beneath it a small circle of char began to spread.
I stepped on the cigarette. Ground it under the toe of my shoe. The smoke faltered, died.
I heard the door open and shut behind me. When I turned, Paul was gone.
my hair. Chandler came up beside me.I stared at the dead cigarette. I ran my fingers up through
“What is it?” she said. “What is going on? Tell me. I don’t understand.”
I smiled at the floor. “Just another fun weekend with Wellsey,” I told her.
She put her hands on my shoulders. “Talk to me, John. You’ve locked me out for too long. This Eleanora—is she someone you knew?”
I looked up into her round, tired, serious face. Her eyes were still nervous, even fearful. But they were patient, too. She waited for me to come to her. My hands remembered the fullness of her flesh. How warm she was. I remembered how sweet she tasted, and all the passion in her.
When did you see her last, Wells?
Tim Colt had asked me that the night he died. But he was really asking me something else. Do you love her? Do you love anyone? Do you know how to love? Have you ever loved the way I have? The way I love Eleanora? Do you think you ever will?
Suddenly, without thinking, I reached for Chandler. I gripped her by the shoulders. I pulled her to me. I kissed her, hard, and her mouth opened to let me in. My hands went over her, over her waist, her breasts, up to hold her face while I kissed her and kissed her.
That night, I made love as I hadn’t in years. The rhythms of it w
ere fierce, almost primal. The heat of it coursed through me like a river of blood. Chandler cried out to me again and again, and again and again I came into her with a fever I’d almost forgotten.
I ached when I woke up the next morning. Saturday morning. I ached all over. My legs hurt from running in the park. My gut hurt from where Watts had slugged me. My nose and forehead stung. When I breathed deeply, my lungs felt like there were pins in them.
I ached, too, with the deep, pleasurable ache of last night’s love. But when I reached out for Chandler, she wasn’t there. The other side of the bed was empty.
I made a low, guttural sound of pain as I forced myself to roll out from under the covers. I fit my legs into my pants and pulled the waistband up around me. Gingerly, stiffly, I walked into the other room.
She was there. She was curled up on the easy chair, where Paul had sat last night. She was wrapped in my bathrobe. It billowed around her. She stared into space, sipping occasionally from a mug of coffee.
We’d left the window open. There was only a faint smell of stale smoke under the fresh, dry chill of the air that filled the room.
Chandler barely glanced up at me when I came in. I remembered the thoughts that had gone through my mind as we’d clung to each other in the dark last night. I felt guilty, as if she knew what I’d been thinking. I avoided looking at her and went into the kitchen.
She’d left the coffee on for me. I poured some into a mug. McKay had given me the mug for my last birthday, my forty-sixth. It was black, with the words SHUT UP in white letters on the side.
I walked to the kitchen doorway, leaned against the jamb. Chandler sat there, still staring into space. I watched her.
“What did you think of me before we … before we were lovers?” she said softly. She sipped her coffee, staring into space. I didn’t answer. She said: “You must have thought I was a terrible old spinster woman. Prim and nervous and living alone with my cat.”
“No,” I lied. “I didn’t think that. That’s dumb.”
She paid no attention. “I suppose I had … turned into that. An old maid, I mean. I guess I was all … shut up in myself. I guess I still am.”
“I’m no better,” I said.
“Maybe.” Chandler stared off thoughtfully. “Maybe we have too much in common in a way. Do you know what I mean?”
“No.”
“I mean, ever since I lost my parents … my mother, really … ever since she died … it’s been very … very hard for me to … to be close … close to anyone.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I know.”
“And you … since your daughter died …”
“I know,” I said.
Finally she raised her eyes to me. Those sad eyes with so many people’s sad stories in them. She listened to them well at her suicide hot line. She listened as people on the brink reached out to her. She and her volunteers listened as people wandered through the caverns of themselves, searching for their long-buried reasons to live. She had traveled through all those other people’s caverns, and that’s not an easy thing to do. But it’s easier than some things. It’s easier than traveling through your own.
“Sometimes,” she said, still softly, “when you wouldn’t call … all those weeks when you wouldn’t call, I would feel … relieved. Sometimes … Do you understand? Can you understand that?”
A pack of cigarettes lay on the desk. I went to it. Set my mug down, hoisted a butt, lit it. I hacked on the first tug of smoke, but I fought to keep the next one down.
“I would feel relieved,” said Chandler. “Because it’s … it’s hard. Trying to … get close, be close. It’s hard, and it’s … painful. For a while, there at the beginning, it looked like we were going to make it, didn’t it? It looked like …” Her voice trailed off.
“Yes,” I said. “It did.”
“But now …”
“Since that night. Since that night I had that dream.”
The words seemed to startle her, as if I’d stolen them directly from her mind. “We just can’t. Can we, John? We just can’t do it. Be close, I mean. Either of us. Maybe that’s why we picked each other. Maybe we recognized that somehow from the start.”
I studied the floor. “Maybe,” I said.
“You know …” For the first time, I heard a trace of tears in her voice. Under her voice, where it would not give her away. “You know, I think you’re one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met.”
I made a noise at her. I was thinking: Colt. Colt knew. Colt knew me from the beginning. He must’ve taken one look at me—one look heightened maybe by the liquor. Heightened by his annoyance at striking out with Lansing, his jealousy … But he must’ve taken that one look at me and pegged me dead to rights. He must’ve been some reporter if he could see that deep that fast. What could he have told me about the others? About Holloway and Wexler and Paul and Robert Collins? About the way they felt about Eleanora? About the way she felt? Surely she must have been the key to it somehow. The way she affected all of them. Otherwise, why hadn’t Wexler told me about seeing her? Or had Paul lied about it? I didn’t know. What would Colt have been able to tell me if he could talk to me still as he had that night in his hotel?
While I considered it, Chandler was saying: “You really are remarkable. You’re … brave is the only word I can think of. I mean, I look at you, at the way you are, and I think … I think you must hurt terribly sometimes … that you must hurt so that you can barely stand it. But then you just … you just keep on … you keep on doing whatever it is you’re doing … getting your story, doing your job, or whatever. And sometimes … I mean, sometimes, I look at you—I look at you doing that—and I think: there’s something … something just not quite nice about this man. Something … But then maybe it takes that … that distance. For you to do your job every day. I don’t know.”
I was only half listening. My mind was elsewhere. I was wondering—trying to imagine—what Colt could have told me about Eleanora. And then, as Chandler spoke, I thought of the one person who might be able to answer that. I thought of the one person who might be able to speak for Colt even now.
That’s what I was thinking up until then. Up until Chandler spoke those last words: “I don’t know.” That’s when she started to cry.
I had never seen her cry before. Not for herself anyway. She wasn’t very good at it. She didn’t just open up and let go of it the way some women can. It chugged out of her painfully. She coughed, trying to fight it back. The tears barely crested her cheeks before she wiped them away as if they angered her.
I took a step toward her. She looked up at me. I stopped.
“Last night …” she said. “Last night, when we were making love … over and over when we were making love …” She buried her face in her hands and cried: “You called me Eleanora.”
I stood at the window and watched her go. She hailed a cab at the curb. I kept watching as the cab carried her off into the light stream of Saturday morning traffic. I watched the people passing back and forth on the sidewalk with their newspapers under their arms.
The air coming in from the window was as clean as it gets in Manhattan. I could even smell Christmas in it, the scent of the oncoming cold. I plucked my latest cigarette from my lips and jammed it out in the ashtray on my desk. I felt empty inside. I did not think I would see Chandler Burke again.
I decided to stop thinking about it. I decided not to think at all. I made a couple of phone calls, then climbed into a clean suit and went downstairs. I walked to the donut store on the corner of Lexington. I bought myself some breakfast in a bag and carried it to the local garage. There, I had the attendants exhume my old maroon Dart, the Artful Dodge.
I munched my donut as I left town. I tore a hole in the cap of my coffee cup and sipped from it, steering with one hand. The Dodge and I rolled over the bridge and out of the borough. We headed down to the Long Island Expressway. I kept not thinking. I kept the radio on.
I turned off the L.I.E. and headed int
o the little brick neighborhoods of Queens. Small trees lined the roads here. Two-story, two-family houses stood close together behind the trees. They were squat brick structures with white curtains shifting at the windows. When I turned a corner, I could see small, square backyards fenced in with chain link behind them. I could see laundry fluttering back there.
Valerie Colt’s house was no different from the others. Two stories of brick. A concrete walk out front. A square of grass out back. As I came up the walk, I could see the blue light of the television flickering behind the white curtains. I could hear bangs and sharp voices and canned laughter. The kids were watching Saturday morning cartoons.
Mrs. Colt opened the door for me. I’d called to let her know I was coming. She was dressed for the occasion in jeans and a pink blouse that set off her red hair. She still wore too much makeup where the wrinkles gathered at her mouth and eyes.
She let me in and led me through a modest kitchen. I glimpsed the kids through a doorway on the right. A boy and a girl, stretched out on their bellies, chins in hands, eyes on tube. Mrs. Colt took me down a hall into a cramped living room. On one wall, glass doors looked out on the backyard. The grass was dead out there. The lone tree was bare and gray. There wasn’t much light coming in. The room seemed dank and shadowy.
There Fell a Shadow Page 17
